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Escape Words: From Solitary Confinement To Female Solidarity In Lena Constante’S Post-Communist Prison Memoirs, Szidonia Haragos

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This article argues that the representative post-Communist autobiographical texts by Romanian writer Lena Constante, based on the author’s personal experience of twelve years of incarceration in Communist Romania’s notorious political prisons, trace a gradual transformation from solitary confinement to female solidarity. While the first of the two memoirs, The Silent Escape, invokes the power of the literary and creative imagination in surviving eight years of solitary confinement, the second part, The Impossible Escape, reveals the growing sense of community among the imprisoned women, their shared sense of suffering that was often induced by torture and frequently endured as a hardship …